A field report on the finances of Carlsbad United FC, doing business as City Soccer Club — built entirely from its own IRS Form 990 filings, fiscal years ending January 2012 through January 2025.
Four directors drew roughly $108,000 apiece from City SC in 2024. In 2025, all four dropped to zero — the same year a company they also run, City Sports Group LLC, went from a local outfit to a national franchise operation. The full trail is on the Ownership tab.
Carlsbad United FC has now filed fourteen years of tax returns. Revenue tripled between 2012 and a 2019 peak, then lurched through several losing years. By 2025 it had fallen to $1.2M — the same year those four directors' pay vanished, and the same year the company they run was expanding coast to coast.
City SC runs almost entirely on program service revenue — player and team fees — not donations. Revenue swings with enrollment and, in the most recent filing, with a restructuring of the club's Southwest (Temecula/Murrieta) programs.
Revenue roughly tripled from $1.53M (FY2012) to $5.03M (FY2019) as the club scaled — still the high-water mark on record.
FY2025 revenue fell to $1.20M, a level the club hadn't seen since 2013 — see the ownership finding below for why.
Bars above the line are surplus years; below the line are deficits. City SC has run a deficit in 6 of the last 14 filed years — including three of the last four.
"Other salaries and wages" (coaches, staff, ops — below the officer/key-employee level) climbed from 1.5% of expenses in FY2012 to a peak of 43.2% in FY2021, then eased as the club professionalized its leadership structure.
The FY2025 revenue drop lines up with the emergence of a separate, for-profit company operating out of the same building.
City Sports Group LLC is a real, separate legal entity — confirmed through California Secretary of State records — run by Stephen Cowell, Michael Duggan, Carl Higham, and Glenn Malone, the same four people listed as "Directors" on Carlsbad United FC's tax return. Its operations run out of 2011 Palomar Airport Rd in Carlsbad, a block from the nonprofit's own address. Through 2025, it went on a signing spree — outside clubs in Manhattan Beach, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Kansas joined what it calls the "City SC National Affiliate Network," and it stood up City SC Southwest in Temecula and Murrieta that November, all of it landing squarely inside the same filing window where the nonprofit's numbers fell apart.
Read the actual filing and it tells a cleaner story than the one above. Line 34 asks whether the organization is related to any tax-exempt or taxable entity: No. Line 28 asks about business transactions with an officer, director, or their controlled entity: No. Line 3 asks whether management was delegated to an outside company: No. On paper, there's nothing to disclose.
The numbers inside that same return tell a different story. Cowell, Duggan, Higham, and Malone are each listed working 40 hours a week — full-time — under the title "Director." In 2024 they split roughly $108,035 apiece. In 2025, all four reported exactly zero. The rest of the staff kept getting paid — other salaries and wages held at $347,903, in line with prior years — so this wasn't a payroll freeze, just a very specific one.
Registration revenue, $1,193,505 worth, still landed on Carlsbad United FC's own books; the money didn't move to a different collector, the total just shrank. And management and general expenses jumped to $755,971, 43.6% of everything the club spent that year — an unusually high share for overhead, and only $32,778 of it (legal and professional fees) gets itemized anywhere in the filing.
California Secretary of State records confirm it: City Sports Group LLC, company number 202000210444, incorporated December 22, 2019, lists Stephen Cowell, Michael Duggan, Carl Higham, and Glenn Malone as its managers — the same four whose Carlsbad United FC pay went from roughly $108,035 each in 2024 to zero in 2025. The LLC's registered address is 4557 Essex Court, Carlsbad; its registered agent, James Vinograd, sits at a La Jolla law office, standard for service of process rather than notable on its own.
The LLC is five years older than this year's filing, so it wasn't created to catch the fallout — more likely it ran quietly at a smaller scale (merchandise, camps, evaluations) before scaling into a national platform around 2024 and 2025. Nothing in the public record shows the LLC's own financials, so there's no way to see how much of Carlsbad United FC's business now runs through it — management fees, licensing, direct billing, or simply four people's paychecks. And the nonprofit's own return still says no to every question that would require disclosing the relationship.
For twelve straight years (FY2012–FY2022), every officer and director on City SC's tax return reported $0 — an all-volunteer board. That changed in FY2023.
Starting FY2023, four people carrying the title "Director" on the return — Steve Cowell, Michael Duggan, Carl Higham and Glenn Malone — began drawing identical five-figure salaries, roughly $103K in 2023, $108K in 2024. The club's own materials list these four as Executive Technical Director, Executive Director of Operations, and Executive Directors of the Girls' and Boys' programs — working staff, not just a governing board, whatever the shared title on the tax form suggests.
In the FY2025 filing, all eight listed officers and directors — including those same four — are reported at $0, even though "other salaries" of $347,903 was still paid out to someone. Zero total executive compensation in a year the club still ran real payroll is worth checking against the underlying Schedule J once the full return is reviewed.
Every figure below is pulled directly from IRS Form 990 extracted data. Click a column-less row — nothing hidden, this is the whole return summary.
| Fiscal Year | Revenue | Expenses | Net Income | Program Svc % | Exec Comp | Other Salaries | Total Assets | Total Liabilities | Net Assets |
|---|